Ever seen 10 million bats? Would you like to? How amazing would it be to see the fruit bat migration in Zambia’s Kasanka National Park?!!?

Five to ten million straw-coloured fruit bats migrate every year through Zambia’s Kasanka National Park.

When the bats feast on fruits in the national park’s swamp forest, they’re hard to miss.

But after they leave, they can fly on journeys of thousands of kilometres. Tracking them has never been easier, thanks to GPS.

Dr Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, tags the bats with mini high-resolution global positioning systems (GPS).

“The [tracking] devices can be downloaded from afar,” Martin says. “Also, they record 3D-acceleration, so we can reconstruct the behaviour of the bats while on the move.”

We can use this tracking data to answer many batty questions: How do bats interact with humans and wildlife? What foods do they eat? How do bats help the environment with services like spreading seeds?

We can also combine this bat data with data from other tracked species and from environmental sensors to help understand what’s happening in the broader ecosystem.

A version of this article first appeared in CSIRO’s Double Helix magazine… Bats do give me a bit of the creeps, but I also think they’re beautiful. Anyone keen to head to Zambia for the next migration? Happy International Bat Day!